Archive for Occulus

It’s inevitable. WoW is an ever-changing game. There are simply too many people that play the game for it to remain static and still be successful. They (meaning Blizzard) are going to change things, and I don’t just mean the content patches. I’m talking more about the changes that they make to already existing parts of the game.

Some changes are more noticeable than others, like for example the changes to the mount system.

Mounts

I didn’t start playing until mid-BC, but I remember running all the way to level 40. I remember how excited I was to be able to get my epic land mount at 60, my basic flyer at 70, and saving, saving, and saving to get epic flight. That was on my hunter, on my warrior, I caught the middle of the transition, getting the basic mount at 30, but I was somewhere in the middle of the flying change. Honestly, with where the game is at this point, I like these changes a lot. Honestly, pretty much everyone just wants to get through the older content as quickly as reasonably possible. Being able to get from point A to point B more quickly cuts down on that time, and more importantly, reduces time where you’re basically just sitting there, holding down a key, time where you’re so to speak doing nothing other than watching the scenery go by.

Leveling

XP goes faster, BoA leveling gear, all the recruit-a-friend bumps… All of them can make leveling go much, much faster. Again, they’re changes that sort of had to be made. If one were a new player coming into the game, the first 68 levels of the game could be a somewhat boring, lonely place. I do like the BoA gear also. I can fully appreciate that Blizz wants people to follow the lore of the game a bit as they level, but realistically, those of us who have already leveled a toon (or several) really don’t care too much about it probably. What the BoA gear does though is basically give you a switch to flip to accelerate the process. If you want to level faster, here’s how you can, if you want to stop, smell the flowers, follow all the lore, etc, you can still do that too.

Those are among what I would consider really positive changes, however, I don’t think that all changes are for the better. Honestly, I read today that there are more incoming nerfs on some of the 5-mans, and honestly, I think all but one of them is unnecessary.

Who would have known. Well, probably there’s some sort of psychological research data out there that Blizz used when they put the achievement system into the game, so maybe they did, but damn, the things that we can be convinced to do for an “achievement”.

So what brings this topic on?

Well, the whole Winter Veil thing starts today, and I’ve decided to go for the Violet Proto-Drake with my warrior. Seems simple enough right, most of the holidays aren’t really that hard, just a little time consuming. But there’s one minor issue. The one achievement requires you do the Ogri’La bombing-run quest on a holiday mount. No biggie right? Not for most of you vets out there, but my warrior was originally leveled as an alt, and conveniently, happened to be in Outlands during the Midsummer Flame Festival, which was the first holiday I actually decided to do on him. Actually it worked out rather well, I got like 2 1/2 levels on him running around doing the flame things, and had my Flame Warden title at like 63-64. Remember too, that was before they popped flying back to lvl 60. So anyway, I ended up basically skipping alot of Outlands between the levels I got from the festival, and having the leveling gear. I didn’t really quest in Nagrand, BeM, SMV, or Netherstorm.

So guess what, I don’t even have the Ogri’La opened up to where I can do the dailies for them.

So last night I set off to open them up. Nothing terribly difficult really, I’m a tank after all, so I manage to relatively easily solo the 5-man group quests that you have to do early in the questline. But let’s be honest, I have a short attention span, and I get bored easily. I got to the quest where you need an ass-load of Apexis Shards. I’m pluggin along collecting them when a good friend in my guild asks if anyone wants to help out on an Occulus achievement run.